Perth Voice Interactive

TIM MUIRHEAD is a Fremantle resident and worked for several decades in the related areas of reconciliation, and community development. In both fields of work he’s spoken with thousands of people about ‘the date’. 

LIKE it or not, the party’s over for January 26.

It’s just not fun anymore; it’s time to let it go and find a day that we can all celebrate with gusto. 

And here’s some good news: I meet surprisingly few people who particularly care about the actual date for our national day. 

Most of us just want to enjoy it. 

So the question is no longer ‘should we change the date?’; it’s ‘what should we change it to?’ 

Change

Some thoughts:

Our nation, like every other nation on earth, is a rich, confusing, multifaceted, often indefinable entity. 

We share it in common, yet rarely see it exactly the same. 

That’s how it should be. 

Loving a nation is like loving—deeply loving—a person. 

The more closely you connect with them the more you come to see and accept all their flaws and strengths and achievements and failings. 

We can never truly love a person or a nation if we focus on only one aspect of their kaleidoscope being. 

And there’s the rub — if we try to choose a date that attaches to any particular event in our history, we diminish ourselves to just one aspect. 

Inevitably we leave out whole swathes of our populace, and whole swathes of the complex experience of being us. 

Let’s take just three of the many defining elements of our nation: the sixty(ish) thousand year history of human connection to, and care for, this land we exist on; the recent British colonisation; and the richly transforming waves of multiculturalism.

What ‘date’ can possibly hold these together, without simplifying us down to almost nothing (and then there’s the wars, the democratic and political struggles and victories, the technological achievements, the various national tragedies, and on and on and on.)?

No date can do it. 

So let’s not just ‘change the date’, let’s drop the ‘date’! 

Have a National DAY instead.  

If it’s good enough for Easter, surely it’s good enough for Oz. 

Here’s a ‘starter list’ for choosing the Day: It would need to be:

• during school term (unlike the current Day), so that our kids can engage in rigorous dialogue about their various perspectives of, and hopes for, our nation;

• in good weather. (Hmmm…not as simple as it sounds; the far north may disagree with the south on that one. Let’s chat).

• on a Friday. (What’s more Australian than the long weekend? I suppose it could be a Monday but…y’know…hangovers. )

• easily identified (eg: Friday 3 in February) so that we can all plan for it.   

Australia is not one thing or the other, it’s all of it. So let’s just choose a day and then, whoever we are and wherever we are, let’s party, and argue, and listen, and speak, and marvel and grieve and connect with this extraordinary, weird, confusing, troubled, rich nation that so many of us love to call home.